I just posted a new article, forthcoming in the NYU Law Review, on the novel vote dilution claims that proliferated in the litigation about the 2020 election. The abstract is below: We may be witnessing the emergence of a new … Continue reading
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
I helped to author an amicus brief in Brnovich, the Supreme Court’s pending case on racial vote denial claims under Section 2 of the VRA. Consistent with a recent article of mine, the brief argues that the burden-shifting framework already … Continue reading
The Duke Law Journal has just published this article of mine. Here’s the abstract: Say you’re wealthy and want to influence American politics. How would you do it? Conventional campaign finance — giving or spending money to sway elections — … Continue reading
With the next redistricting cycle about to begin, I wanted to note some major developments at PlanScore. First off, the site now includes partisan fairness scores that incorporate the results of the 2018 election. Second, the site now covers state … Continue reading
This is a piece I’ve written for the Washington Post on the Court’s choice to decide so many “shadow docket” election cases. But the court didn’t have to resolve any of these voting disputes. And it shouldn’t have resolved them. By intervening … Continue reading
In the event that there’s unified Democratic government in Washington next year, electoral reform is likely to be high on the agenda. Debates about such reform revolve around not just its policy merits but also its constitutionality. In that vein, … Continue reading
Here’s the link to a Supreme Court amicus brief, filed earlier today on behalf of several election law scholars (including myself), asking the Court to provide more guidance about the Purcell principle. The brief makes two principal arguments: (1) that … Continue reading
Supreme Court observers have begun to pay more attention to the Court’s “shadow docket”: disputes the Court resolves summarily, without the usual briefing, argument, explanations, or even indications how each Justice voted. Still mostly overlooked, however, is that the Court … Continue reading
Tim Kuhner’s new book is out. Reviews and excerpts can be found here. The preface is available here. And here’s a trailer, too. … Continue reading
A couple weeks ago, Jowei Chen and I posted our forthcoming article, “The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights.” The replication code and data files for this project are now also available online, along with the appendix. The appendix includes detailed … Continue reading
Yesterday I summarized my forthcoming work with Jowei Chen on the implications of race-blind redistricting for minority representation. Today I’ll talk about our partisan representation findings: how the major parties would be affected if district lines were drawn on a … Continue reading
I linked yesterday to my forthcoming article with Jowei Chen on the implications of race-blind redistricting. In this post, I thought I’d provide some additional detail about our methods and findings. First, to conduct a non-racial line-drawing process, we used … Continue reading
Jowei Chen and I just posted this article. It’s forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, and its abstract is below: A critical issue in any racial vote dilution case is the proportionality (or lack thereof) of a minority group’s representation: … Continue reading
My latest for Slate. Here’s how the piece begins: Until recently, litigation about voting during the COVID-19 crisis followed a predictable pattern. Voters would complain about states’ restrictive regulations, conservatives would rush to the laws’ defense, and courts would referee … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Chris Warshaw, a political scientist at George Washington University: On November 3, 2020, voters across the country will go to the polls to cast their ballots for President, among other local, state, and … Continue reading
A new paper by Jeffrey Buzas and Gregory Warrington. Here’s the abstract: We introduce simulated packing and cracking as a technique for evaluating partisan-gerrymandering measures. We apply it to historical congressional and legislative elections to evaluate four measures: partisan bias, … Continue reading
My article on Rucho and the Roberts Court is now up on the Supreme Court Review website (and available without subscription here). Once upon a time, Carolene Products provided an inspiring charter for the exercise of the power of judicial … Continue reading
This short piece of mine on election law cases involving the pandemic is coming out soon in the University of Chicago Law Review Online. In this brief essay, I consider how courts have deployed the framework of sliding-scale scrutiny in … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Bill Whitford, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School. The United States Supreme Court did not need to reach a definitive decision in the recent lawsuit concerning the rules governing absentee … Continue reading
I just posted this new article, which is forthcoming in the Duke Law Journal. It tackles what I call “quasi campaign finance” — money spent on non-electoral politics that nevertheless relies on an electoral connection to be effective. The abstract … Continue reading
My article with Chris Warshaw on how partisan gerrymandering impedes numerous party functions — candidate recruitment, fundraising, appealing to voters, and so on — is now up on the Legislative Studies Quarterly website. The abstract is below: The relationship between … Continue reading
A very interesting post by Darrell Miller connecting ongoing Second Amendment debates to my forthcoming article, The Anti-Carolene Court. Stephanopoulos, as a voting rights scholar, is most concerned with how judicial action (or inaction) aids partisan entrenchment rather than prevents … Continue reading
Here’s the abstract for a new article of mine arguing that Rucho — along with much of the Court’s other election law jurisprudence — should be understood as the product of the Court’s aversion to Carolene Products-style pro-democratic judicial review. … Continue reading
Earlier today, the North Carolina legislature approved remedial maps to replace the state house and state senate plans that were recently struck down as partisan gerrymanders. PlanScore assessed the remedial maps, and here are the results. For the state house, … Continue reading
Remarkably, yesterday’s decision striking down North Carolina’s state legislative maps as partisan gerrymanders was the eighth straight ruling against gerrymandering by a state or lower federal court. Florida and Pennsylvania state courts preceded yesterday’s decision by a three-judge North Carolina … Continue reading
My latest for Slate (though not the title I would have chosen). I first describe the new gerrymandering techniques we may see after Rucho: Let’s start with the schemes we’re likely to see now that the federal courts have been … Continue reading
Ruth Greenwood in the Fulcrum: Last year the court told us in Whitford that it wanted us to develop further evidence to explain the harms to individual voters of the Wisconsin gerrymander. Consequently, my team has spent the last 12 months hearing … Continue reading
In a nice post about the Court’s Census decision, Rick Pildes noted that Chief Justice Roberts approached the case in a realist fashion, probing beneath the surface to figure out what actually did and would happen. This realism was entirely … Continue reading
Will Baude has an intriguing post suggesting that, even after Rucho, federal partisan gerrymandering claims can still be brought in state court. The rationale is that federal jurisdictional doctrines like standing, mootness, and justiciability don’t apply in state court. So a state court … Continue reading
In its decision last year in Whitford, the Court provided all kinds of clues about what a successful partisan gerrymandering claim would look like. It would be district-specific, not plan-wide. That way it would be congruent with the standing inquiry … Continue reading
I’ll have more to say about the Court’s appalling opinion in Rucho in Rick’s symposium next week. But I want to flag one point now: the Court’s erasure of racial vote dilution doctrine. This is the doctrine that allows groups … Continue reading
After today’s disastrous decision, here are some things that line-drawers could do in the future: Instruct a computer algorithm to generate huge numbers of maps that comply with all nonpartisan criteria and produce as large and durable an advantage as … Continue reading
In his dissent in today’s decision in Gundy v. United States, Justice Gorsuch repeatedly claims that excessive congressional delegation to agencies threatens to undermine congressional accountability. “[B]y directing that legislating be done only by elected representatives in a public process, … Continue reading
Chris Warshaw for Monkey Cage: There are several ways to measure partisan advantage in a districting plan, including the efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, declination and the mean-median difference. These metrics all capture distortions in the vote-seat relationship. In a recent work, Nicholas Stephanopoulos and I averaged … Continue reading
One recurring argument in the ongoing debate over partisan gerrymandering suits is that, if they can be brought, they will inundate the federal courts. Wisconsin advanced this floodgates claim in Whitford, asserting that courts would have to engage in “unprecedented … Continue reading
Today’s decision striking down Ohio’s congressional districts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders is notable in several respects. First, it was again unanimous. By my count, this is the fourth consecutive decision (following those in Maryland, Michigan, and North Carolina) in which … Continue reading
Last week, a three-judge district court unanimously held that twenty-seven Michigan state house, state senate, and congressional districts are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The consequences of the decision are important. If it’s upheld, Michigan will have fair district maps in 2020 … Continue reading
My article on unifying disparate impact law has just come out in the Yale Law Journal. Here’s the abstract: The last decade has seen the largest wave of franchise restrictions since the dark days of Jim Crow. In response to … Continue reading
Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag for SCOTUS OA: Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek are the last chance the Court has before the 2020 census to do something about partisan gerrymandering. So, with the future of democracy in the balance, how … Continue reading
More than thirty years ago, Sandy Levinson wrote an article called “Gerrymandering and the Brooding Omnipresence of Proportional Representation.” The article is old but its title was as apt as ever in today’s oral arguments in Rucho and Lamone, in … Continue reading
What will happen in the 2020 redistricting cycle if the Supreme Court follows the advice of the defendants in the Maryland and North Carolina cases and holds that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable? Some may think that, in that event, … Continue reading
A nice analysis by FiveThirtyEight using the partisan bias metric and covering North Carolina’s congressional plan (extremely skewed in Republicans’ favor), the court-drawn remedial plan in Pennsylvania (almost perfectly neutral), and all congressional plans currently in effect (exhibiting a significant … Continue reading
A new column of mine in Slate, based on my new paper with Chris Warshaw. In a nutshell, we found that Kagan was right. A party disadvantaged by gerrymandering fails to contest more districts. The candidates it does nominate have weaker credentials. … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Jon Eguia: In a previous post I introduced a measure of partisan advantage in redistricting. This measure compares the election outcome to a benchmark seat distribution that is not directly influenced by redistricting. More … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Jon Eguia: I propose a measure of partisan advantage in redistricting. A distinctive feature of this measure is that it captures only the partisan advantage that is due to the redistricting map in … Continue reading
The federal court redrawing portions of Virginia’s House of Delegates map recently announced the new configuration of the district lines. PlanScore evaluated both the old plan and the new one. As you can see below, the improvement is dramatic. The … Continue reading
In yesterday’s post, I described the data and methods that Chris Warshaw and I use in a new paper on the effects of partisan gerrymandering on parties’ associational activities. Today I’ll discuss our findings and their implications. In a nutshell, … Continue reading
In her concurring opinion in Whitford, Justice Kagan suggested that partisan gerrymandering might be unconstitutional not just because it dilutes the votes of a party’s supporters but also because it burdens their associational rights. “Members of the ‘disfavored party’ in … Continue reading
It’s not interesting that Mitch McConnell isn’t a fan of H.R. 1. He was the lead plaintiff against the last major campaign finance reforms that Congress passed. So of course he isn’t going to like H.R. 1’s heightened disclosure requirements, … Continue reading
I mentioned the other day that H.R. 1 would revolutionize American redistricting by requiring congressional maps to be designed by independent commissions. The bill would spark equally radical change in how congressional campaigns are financed, by creating two separate public … Continue reading